Critique of Ted Kooser's "Tattoo"

The speaker in Ted Kooser's poem Tattoo creates a narrative for an tattoo-ed old man who he observes at a yard sale. In just 15 lines, the speaker describes this old man as being permanently marked by the bad decisions of his youth because of his tattoos, and it seems that for the speaker this is especially sad because the old man looks like he must've been "someone you had to reckon with,/strong as a stallion" in his younger years. The poem ends with the line "his heart gone soft and blue with stories," which I interpreted to be a parallel between the faded soft blue ink of his tattoos, the taming of the 'stallion's' heart with age, and the decreasing efficiency of his physical body. 

Kooser's speaker characterizes the old man for the reader through a combination of the character-as-desire and character-as-image methods. The speaker describes the tattoo and the old man's physical appearance--including how he flaunts the tattoo with "his tight black T-shirt rolled up to show us who he was." In doing so,  we get the sense that the old man's driving desire is to be young again.